The present invention relates to a printer and a print-condition setting method for the printer, and more particularly to a printer capable of performing printing with an external memory medium such as a memory card attached to the printer according to print-condition setting information read from the external memory medium, and to a print-condition setting method for the printer.
Further, the present invention relates to a printer capable of performing printing according to print-condition setting information set by peripheral equipment such as a digital still camera (hereinafter called the “digital camera”) to be connected via a communication interface and to a print-condition setting method for the printer.
Stand-alone printers (sometimes called direct printers) capable of printing data on printing paper independently have come into wide used recently without the necessity of their being connected to host computers represented by personal computers.
Typically, such a stand-alone printer reads data on printing objects from a memory card added to a card interface and prints out the data. Therefore, any user not owning a personal computer or the like can utilize the stand-alone printer for directly printing the pictorial data taken in by a digital camera and stored in a memory card without a personal computer.
There is also a stand-alone printer for directly reading pictorial data from a digital camera so as to print the data after being connected to the digital camera via a communication interface such as a USB without attaching a memory card to the printer.
Since the stand-alone printer need not be connected to the host computer, the printer body is provided with a control panel (user interface) for setting print instructions and various print conditions that have heretofore been set to specify, for example, types and sizes of printing paper, the number of printing copies, print quality, layouts and so forth over the host computer.
Although the stand-alone printer above is designed so that various print conditions can be set by a user through the control panel, it has been only possible to set the print conditions within a range of contents that have been incorporated into a control device in the printer body. With respect to setting layouts, for example, only the layouts considered to be in general use including printing post cards, seals and indexes, have been defined and performing printing in accordance with a layout for specific use could not have been done.
Consequently, there has been proposed a stand-alone printer so arranged that a print-condition file designating a layout for specific use is stored in a memory card beforehand whereby to read the print-condition file from the memory card in order to set the print conditions when printing is done in accordance with the layout without being incorporated into the control device of the printer body beforehand.
However, the control panel of the stand-alone printer is provided with only necessary and sufficient functions to achieve the original display/selection objective of setting various print conditions but still has a problem in that it is not user-friendly when a desired print-condition file is selected from the memory card with a plurality of print-condition files stored therein so as to set the desired print conditions. Moreover, a highly functional control panel is difficult to provide in view of keeping the production cost lower.